Marius Roux is far and away one of the best book designers we have. Any reader knows that the cover of a book is crucial: it catches the eye, of course, but it also sets the tone for what’s inside — a bright and breezy romance or a serious history, a gripping thriller or a whimsical magical-realist tale. You absolutely can judge a book by its cover.
Readers are less aware of the importance of typography: the font, style, and placement of text all influence the voice and readability of the book, while the actual paper on which it is printed is important, too. The term “pulp fiction” originated from the paper used in cheap, mass-market paperbacks made from wood pulp.
A scroll through Roux’s portfolio online yields a dazzling collection of covers, many for literary heavyweights like Ingrid Winterbach, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, and Damon Galgut. Now he has produced an outstanding jacket for Dominique Botha’s new book, The Crying Bride & Other Hallucinations. Using a portrait of Botha painted by the artist John Murray, he designed a gatefold cover that opens up to reveal the full painting. It’s a striking cover for an utterly extraordinary book.
The Crying Bride is a collection of essays, or what Botha calls “autobiographical imaginings”.
She is a writer of piercing perception and rich eloquence.
“We drive into a landscape eaten to the bones by drought. A landscape of people who ask and receive very little. I look away because I don’t want to see.”
It quickly becomes clear that these are the writings of a poet; every word is weighed, every sentence tooled and filigreed. “But I come from a farm in the Free State, there where the sunset is born. Where flamingos hoisted the late afternoon over the pan on the banner of rose and fire, and winter was a white piano of glass.”
Many, if not most, of the essays centre on her family — a family that can be traced back to the VOC ship Europa arriving in 1681, and which was the subject of her first book, False River. Straight out of the starting gates, she won the UJ Prize, the Eugène Marais Prize, and the Jan Rabie-Rapport prize. That was in 2013, and apart from a poetry collection (which won the Ingrid Jonker Prize), it has been a long wait for another book.
Botha’s father, Andries, looms large in her writing. A pithy, vigorous farmer and Tyrant For Life, “His children were all dreamers, his night watchman a drunkard, his amanuensis a diesel thief.” She writes, “Pa could do anything. He was farmer of the year. He could hold Ma’s fear.”
Her brother Paul, who was the main subject of False River, returns in these pages as she revisits his death from a heroin overdose in London. “Alone, like a man without an address, on a threadbare couch in a nowhere place.”
Her formidable mother, Sandra, is presented here not as the firebrand politician she was but as a bride, holding a white, blue-eyed cat named Johannes. “Ma and Pa’s love is kept alive by misunderstanding and resentment.”
There’s Aunty A, who at 90 years old is “as fresh and sharp as lemon juice” and has an eye for young men in Speedos; a gruff Rian Malan coaxing his leiwater along in the Klein Karoo; a defiant Breyten Breytenbach; a vain VS Naipaul; and the shoemaker Abe Steinberg with his Stradivarius, part of the Jewish tribe of Bondeldraers who “crisscrossed the interior with pots and pans and partitas and pollinated the ends of the earth as emissaries of Johann Sebastian Bach”.
Scattered throughout the pages are uncaptioned pictures and photographs related to the essays. In colour, too, which is increasingly rare in these less pecunious publishing times. They add an extra layer of richness to the collection.
The Crying Bride is published by the brand-new Painted Dog Press. A new publisher on the South African literary scene is cause for celebration, especially one with the DNA of Painted Dog. It is the brainchild of advertising genius John Hunt — himself a fine author — and ace editor Fourie Botha. Hunt says that in a world of AI sameness they wanted to start a bespoke, individual publishing house that respects writers and their work and is not a slave to the algorithm. In essence, they’ll publish what they damn well like. Their first publication was Bitterkomix: Sketchbooks and Journals, a collection of work by the rambunctious satirical duo Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes.
I’m drumming my fingers in anticipation of their next publication: a new novel by the truly numinous writer Claire Robertson, titled The Good Death. And hoping, too, that it won’t be so long before another shimmering Dominique Botha book.
From the July issue of Wanted, 2026.
